


What Lies Beyond

by nickelsandcoats



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-03-24
Updated: 2011-03-24
Packaged: 2017-10-18 02:22:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,185
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/183928
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nickelsandcoats/pseuds/nickelsandcoats
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A series of 6 vignettes in which Sherlock and John wonder what happens next.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What Lies Beyond

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into English available: [За Гранью](https://archiveofourown.org/works/620981) by [sKarEd](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sKarEd/pseuds/sKarEd)



> For [this prompt](http://sherlockbbc-fic.livejournal.com/6375.html?thread=28129255#t28129255) at [](http://sherlockbbc-fic.livejournal.com/profile)[**sherlockbbc_fic**](http://sherlockbbc-fic.livejournal.com/).
> 
> Now translated into Chinese by Sabrina: http://www.mtslash.com/viewthread.php?tid=30295&highlight= or at  
> http://www.sherlock2010.net/forum.php?mod=viewthread&tid=43&page=1#pid495

**  
_8 November 1980_   
**

“Sherlock, Mycroft? Could you come to the study, please?”

Mummy’s voice was cracked and her eyes were red. She had been crying, and was just barely keeping her tears back. Daddy looked serious and sad, one hand gripping his wife’s shoulders.

Mycroft reached over and took Sherlock’s hand. He had a feeling he knew what Mummy was going to say, and it was likely that Sherlock, who was only four, would need some support.

Mummy swallowed and finally said, “Oh, boys, I’m so sorry, but your Grandmother has died.” She reached down and pulled the boys into a hug, letting her tears fall again.

Sherlock pulled back and looked confused. “What does that mean?”

Mycroft cleared his throat to speak, but his father beat him to it, looking down at his youngest son as he started to say, “It means that she’s gone to sleep—”

“Well, why can’t someone just wake her up? If she’s sleeping, she should wake up again soon,” Sherlock interrupted.

Mummy gave Sherlock a watery smile. Father frowned at the interruption and finished his sentence: “forever. She won’t wake up again, Sherlock.”

“Why not?”

“Because that’s what happens when you die, Sherlock,” Mycroft explained. “When you die, you close your eyes and go to sleep and never wake up again.”

Sherlock looked thoughtful for a moment, but nodded in understanding after a bit.

Mycroft looked back at his mother and gave her a fierce hug. “I’m sorry that you lost your mother, Mummy.”

Sherlock surged forward, not to be outdone, and kissed his mother, adding, “I’m sorry, too, Mummy.”

“Thank you, darlings.”

*

That night, Mycroft heard Sherlock snuffle and wail softly in his room next door. Mycroft rolled over and squinted at his clock. It was 3.35; Sherlock might be having a nightmare. Not wanting to disturb Mummy and Father, he rolled out of bed and padded into Sherlock’s room and looked down at his brother, who was valiantly trying to keep his eyelids open.

“What’s wrong?”

“I don’t wanna go to sleep. I’m scared.”

“Scared of what?”

“I’m scared I’ll die like Grandmother and won’t wake up again.”

Mycroft sighed. “I’m sorry, Sherlock, I should’ve been clearer earlier. You’re not going to die if you sleep.”

“But you said!”

“I know what I said,” Mycroft said as he settled down on the edge of Sherlock’s bed. “Have you slept at all tonight?” he asked as he reached over and smoothed the curls away from Sherlock’s forehead.

“No.”

“Oh, Sherlock.” His brother’s eyes pierced through him, full of fear and sleepiness and sadness.

“Will I get to see Grandmother again?”

“No, you won’t. Unless you see her at the funeral.”

“What’s a funeral?”

Mycroft sighed. This was going to be a long night, he just knew it. “A funeral is where you go to say goodbye to the person who died. A clergyman will usually lead a service and people who knew the person who died will usually say something nice about the person. Sometimes you can go up and see the deceased person in their casket and say goodbye before they are buried.”

“What’s a casket?”

“It’s like a box that the deceased person is put in before they are buried.”

“Why?”

“It’s just what people do, I guess.”

“What happens to the box?”

“Well, after the funeral, everyone goes to the gravesite, which is where the person will be buried in the ground. The clergyman will say a prayer for the dead and then the casket is put in the ground.”

Sherlock was silent for a moment. Then he asked, “How do you die?”

Mycroft sighed again, “That depends. You can get hurt so badly that your body stops working, or you get so old that your organs stop working, or you can get really really sick and die. Grandmother was very old, and her body just quit working. You’ll understand better when you’re older.”

Sherlock mulled this new information over. “So I won’t die if I go to sleep?”

Mycroft smiled despite himself. “No, no you won’t.”

“Will I die? Will you die? What about Mummy and Daddy?”

Mycroft looked sad for a moment. “Yes, Sherlock. Everyone dies eventually. But we won’t die for a very long time, and neither will Mummy and Father.”

“Promise?”

“I promise.” Mycroft waited for a moment and then asked, “Will you go to sleep now?”

“Will you stay with me, just to make sure I don’t die?”

Mycroft smiled and said, “Of course. Goodnight, Sherlock.” He crawled under the covers and kissed his brother’s forehead. It took him a long time to fall asleep.

*

When Mycroft awoke early the next morning, he was greeted by Sherlock’s large blue-grey eyes staring into his own.

“What happens when you die?” Sherlock asked.

Mycroft blinked at him. “No one knows, Sherlock.”

“Well, what do people think happens?”

“Haven’t Mummy and Father talked to you about Heaven and Hell?”

Sherlock looked puzzled.

Mycroft sighed. “I’ll tell you a little now, but you should ask Mummy or Father in a few weeks to tell you more. People who are Christians, like we are, believe that when you die, your soul goes to either Heaven or Hell. If you were a good person in life, you go to Heaven, which is like Paradise. If you were a bad person, you go to Hell, which is full of fire.”

Sherlock’s eyes were round. “So Grandmother’s in Heaven, right now?”

Mycroft leaned over and kissed his brother’s forehead. “Yes, Sherlock, she is.”

  
******

  
 **  
_22 June 1978_   
**

John Watson was six years old when his dog, Joey, died. His family held a little service for Joey in their yard before they buried him under the oak tree. Mum put a comforting arm around him and hugged him close as his Dad smoothed over the dirt mound. Harry solemnly dropped a bouquet of flowers on top of the mound of dirt as John let a few last tears roll down his cheeks.

Joey was in heaven right now, chasing after his favorite ball and chewing on as many bones as he liked. Mum had said so, and so John believed her.

“Everyone who was good in life goes to Heaven,” she said. “Heaven is full of all the things you liked in life and you get to see all the people you love who are already in Heaven.”

This had made quite an impression on John. “So I could have all the 99s I wanted in Heaven? And get to play with Joey?”

Mum had smiled and ruffled his hair, “Yes, John. But Heaven is a reward for being good for your whole life, so you have to promise me that you’ll be good.”

John nodded vigourously. “I promise, Mum.”

Later that night, John asked his mum, “When do you get to go to Heaven?”

“You go to Heaven when you die, remember, love?”

John nodded. “And once you go to Heaven, you don’t get to come back, right?”

“No, sweetheart, you don’t come back from Heaven.”

“But what happens to people who are bad? Where do they go?”

His mum sighed and said, “People who are bad don’t get to go to Heaven; they go to Hell, which is the opposite of Heaven. Hell is a very nasty, bad place, and it’s not somewhere you want to be.”

John looked like he was going to say something else, but changed his mind and took his plate to the sink instead.

When his mum came in to kiss him goodnight, John said something that made her heart clench.

“Mum,” he said very seriously, “I don’t want you or Dad or Harry to die and go to Heaven. I want you to stay here forever.”

“Oh, John. Everyone dies, sweetheart, that’s just how life works. But none of us will die for a long time, I promise.”

John’s mouth set in a stubborn line. “I’m going to make it so people don’t die. If they’re sick, I’ll fix them.”

“I’m sure you will, love. Try and get some sleep.” She leaned over and kissed his cheeks. “I love you.”

“Love you,” John mumbled as he rolled over and slept.

  
******

  
 **  
_13 January 2001_   
**

Sherlock blinked back into consciousness and stared at the dirty ceiling of his filthy flat. His high had faded and he had crashed hard. The nervous buzzing that always filled his brain after a high was insistent. He pressed his hands to his ears in an effort to block out the noise in his brain, but to no avail. All that could fix it was getting high again.

He reached for the syringe and shot up. Bliss.

But the bliss didn’t last. He started shaking and sweating, his heart started pounding so hard he thought it would beat right out of his chest. Something was wrong. Very wrong.

He picked up his phone and barely managed to hold onto it because he was shaking so badly. He managed to open it and sent a text to Mycroft, who he never contacted unless it was a dire emergency.

 _I need you  
SH_

He slumped down after pressing send and let the blackness claim him. There was nothing in that blackness.

*

When he woke again, he felt as if he had been dropped from a very tall building, or run over by a lorry. He was in hospital, hooked up to a multitude of machines. He didn’t remember anything after texting Mycroft, who was…sitting in a chair looking very angry.

“Glad to see you’re still with us,” Mycroft hissed as he leaned forward. “Do you have any idea what you’ve put Mummy and me through the past few days?”

Sherlock looked at his brother, and for the first time, felt afraid of him. “I died, didn’t I?”

“More than once.”

Mycroft stopped to let that sink in. He took a vicious pleasure in seeing Sherlock’s eyes widen.

“What happened?” Sherlock whispered.

“After I got your text, I went straight to your flat and had to have the driver kick in the door. You were unconscious and barely breathing on your sitting room floor. I rang for an ambulance and followed you here. Apparently, you crashed in the ambulance and it took them almost a minute to revive you. You crashed again an hour later, and it took them nearly two minutes to bring you back that time. It was touch-and-go there for a few days; your heart was just about done in. They told us that if you crashed again, that you might not be strong enough to come back.”

Sherlock absorbed all of this impassively.

“When you are released from hospital, you’re going directly to rehab. Enough is enough, Sherlock. This isn’t worth your life.”

There was a long silence, broken only by the beeps of the machines Sherlock was hooked into. Finally, Mycroft leaned forward again and took Sherlock’s hand. “What happened? When you were gone? Do you remember?”

Sherlock turned to fix his brother with a glare and snatched his hand away as he growled, “You lied.”

Mycroft looked surprised. “What did I lie about?”

“There is no Heaven or Hell. There is nothing, nothing after you die. This is it, all we have.” He turned his head away and refused to say anything else.

After Mycroft left, Sherlock allowed himself to cry for exactly one minute. All his life, he had clung to what his older brother had told him when Grandmother died. To learn that Mycroft was wrong, that there was nothing waiting for them but blackness was a betrayal beyond anything else, and he vowed not to let himself be manipulated by Mycroft any longer.

  
******

  
 **  
_18 August 2008_   
**

“Just hang on, soldier, I’ll get you patched up in no time,” John said as he scrabbled in his pack for gauze and morphine. The soldier under him, Hobson, had a severed femoral artery and he didn’t have long. John swallowed back the thick feeling of failure and guilt that threatened to choke him as he gave Hobson a healthy dose of morphine.

Hobson grabbed his arm and held him there. Looking John straight in the eye, he said, “I’m not going to make it, am I?”

John tore his gaze away as he tightened a tourniquet around Hobson’s thigh. “You’ll be fine,” he lied.

But Hobson knew, they all knew when their time was up. “What do you think comes next, Doctor?”

“I think that you get to see everyone who you loved who’s already waiting for you in Heaven,” John said, flashing a sad smile at Hobson.

“Good, that’s good,” Hobson said, voice already fading.

“Do you have anyone waiting on you there?” John asked gently as he took Hobson’s hand in an effort to give some comfort to the young soldier.

“My dad and grandparents,” Hobson gasped, clenching John’s hand tightly.

“Then go meet them. I’ll stay here with you,” John said. He fought back tears as Hobson looked at him gratefully, and then took his last breath. John reached over and gently closed his eyes before taking one of Hobson’s dogtags and dropping it into his pocket, adding one more to the too-large pile.

He always hated it when people asked him what came next. He tried to be positive, to remember what his mum had told him about Heaven all those years ago, but with each passing day in Afghanistan watching young men and women die under his hands and feeling helpless and powerless, John found it harder and harder to believe that there was anything to look forward to when the pain ended and peace came at last.

  
******

  
 **  
_6 April 2010_   
**

There had been a bomb vest, two mad geniuses, a gun, a swimming pool, and an explosion.

Now John and Sherlock were trapped in a pile of rubble, and John was afraid that he wasn’t going to live. _Please, God, let me live,_ he prayed as he saw Sherlock’s wild eyes and heard his frantic questions of “What do I do to help you, John?” as the detective ignored his own injuries.

John thought that if he was going to die, he should ask Sherlock what came after death, because if anyone knew, it would be Sherlock. So, he wet his lips and wheezed, “What do you think happens to us when we die?”

Sherlock’s breath caught in his chest. _Lie!_ he thought, _You can’t tell John that there’s nothing after death—he doesn’t need to know that cruelty._ He took a deep breath and said, “I think that Heaven is whatever you imagine it to be.”

John smiled at him. “My mum told me that Heaven was full of all the things you liked in life and that you got to see everyone you loved in Heaven. I used to tell dying soldiers to go meet their loved ones just before they died.”

John started coughing up blood after he said that, and Sherlock cradled him to his chest, biting back his fear. “Hang on, John, just a little longer. I can hear the ambulance coming.”

John’s eyes slipped closed as he breathed out, “I’ll wait for you, Sherlock.”

*

It took three days before John was allowed out of intensive care and another week before he was allowed to go home, but what mattered was that he was home.

It took four more months of dancing around their feelings for each other before they finally fell into bed together.

Two years after that, they were married.

  
******

  
 **  
_24 October 2034_   
**

The day John died was a cloudy, windy day. The bees were holed up in their hives, and John Watson lay dying in their bed.

When they retired five years ago and moved to Sussex, Sherlock had started keeping bees while John wrote up their cases and turned them into a book, which he published to great acclaim. Life was peaceful and quiet in the country, and the two of them enjoyed the quiet after the whirlwind their lives had been.

The peace was shattered six months ago when John noticed a lump on his abdomen. Cancer. Stage IV Hodgkin’s lymphoma that had spread through John’s body and attacked his organs. It had progressed too quickly for anything to be done but make him comfortable while he waited for the end to come.

Sherlock went into their room and smiled softly at his husband. John watched him with sunken eyes. He was too weak to get out of bed, now, and was in near constant pain. It nearly broke Sherlock to see his husband like this, to know that he was in pain and couldn’t do anything to help him.

Sherlock crawled into bed next to his husband and took his hand, squeezing it gently. He reached up and kissed John gently before lying back down and pressing his forehead to John’s temple.

“What do you think happens to us when we die?” Sherlock asked.

John’s lips barely quirked as he summoned the energy to whisper, “I think that you and I continue on as we always did. We’ll be young again, and we’ll have our little house and you’ll have your bees and I’ll have my books and my journals to write in. We’ll visit our parents and eventually, when they get there too, Harry and Mycroft. Lestrade will come visit us and tell us about what idiots we all were when we three were chasing criminals through London.”

Sherlock smiled and whispered, “That sounds perfect.”

John’s breath was wheezing in his chest and his heart, Sherlock noticed, was beating more and more faintly. Sherlock looked at John, whose eyes were pleading with him to understand what he needed Sherlock to say. Sherlock kissed him once more and whispered, “Go, John, and wait for me. I’ll be there as soon as I can.” He squeezed John’s hand and said softly, “I love you.”

John shuddered once and let himself go.

*

John waited for five years before Sherlock came to find him.

John was in the back garden checking over the hives, the sun glinting in his blond hair when he noticed the tall, thin, black haired figure swathed in a familiar coat that he hadn’t seen in years. John’s face split in a grin as Sherlock saw him and broke into a run. John met him halfway across the garden, catching his husband in his arms and kissing him until they were both breathless.

“Hello,” Sherlock said when they parted.

“Welcome home,” John replied as he leaned in and kissed his husband again.

 _I am so glad John was right,_ Sherlock thought as he let John show him around, hands clasped tightly together. _And now that I’m here, I’m never letting him go._

John must’ve seen something of his thoughts in his face because he leaned up and kissed Sherlock again, and laughed.

“We have forever now,” John said softly. “And I can’t think of anything better.”

“No,” Sherlock said, “there is nothing better than this,” and he smiled as John laughed again and led him into their house, closing the door with a quiet click.

  
\--Fin--  



End file.
